Population Pop:
The World’s Growth Rate Continues to Decline Despite the Continuous Rise of the World’s Population
[The] real problem is not population explosion, but what the population is doing. -Radhanath Swami
Picture a dejected human being standing on a dirtied street corner with a homemade cardboard sign that reads ‘The end is nigh’. This is not an example of that. Instead I will be using data (World Population Prospects)by the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat to show that the world’s rate of growth is declining despite the fact that population is currently growing. This suggests the future holds a point in time where the population is no longer growing, but declining with the falling fertility rates. It doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world, but perhaps an end to many beliefs that the world is speeding towards overpopulation.
Population
Thomas Malthus, English economist and demographer, published a book in 1798 called An Essay on the Principle of Population. In that book he introduced his Theory of Population, in which he concluded that humanity would be at a persistent threat of having more people than food available for them should population growth continue to grow without conditions. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich, a biology professor at Stanford University, wrote and published The Population Bomb. In his book, Ehrlich made a series of predictions, one of which connecting overpopulation to a famine he predicted to take place between the 1970’s and 80’s. These books are both worth being mentioned because they both provided the backdrop for surpopophobia (fear of overpopulation).
The credit does not entirely rest on the shoulders of Malthus and Ehrlich. When we define overpopulation as a population exceeding the amount of resources available to it, an argument can be made that there has been a fear of overpopulation as long as there has been a population, and that is inclusive of all species. When one considers the added influence of fictional works which portray dystopias developed from an overpopulated Earth, it becomes clear that surpopophobia is not due to diminish as population continues to grow, but worsen.
Knock knock. Who’s there? The joke that’s not being given. Malthus and Ehrlich (Ehrlich more than Malthus) have both been considered wrong in their predictions. In 1798 the world’s population neared 800 million, while today the world’s population is ten times that and we have yet to make his point, although we have yet to break his point as well. The world was not overpopulated in 1968(Fig.1) just as it isn’t overpopulated today, so what are we so afraid of? And if that’s not the big population threat what is?
Look at the chart in Fig. 1, as you can see the population more than doubles over the 70 year span. Layman’s logic would suggest that by the year 2090 the world could reach a population of 16 billion people. With numbers like that Thomas Malthus doesn’t seem so wrong, however, the average person won’t have factored in aggravating or mitigating factors. Just as the data used to create that chart does not include the effect of Covid-19 on the population(or future technological advancements or scientific discoveries).
Now consider the chart in Fig. 2. The World Population Prospects as of 2019 only shows a population increase of around 2 billion people by the year 2098, that’s a 25% increase over 70 years versus the over 100% increase in the 70 years prior, and as both figures are created from the same data it too doesn’t factor in the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Births and the Falling Fertility Rate
So what does all of this mean? For the population to begin to decline the number of births merely has to fall below the number of deaths. In other words, The growth rate(Fig. 3) would need to descend into the negative numbers. For that you’ll need to understand what a drop in fertility rates means for the population.
While exploring the data, it wasn’t hard to reach the conclusion that the fertility rates worldwide had decreased. For that information one really only needs to google ‘Fertility Rates Drop’ for a number of articles and posts expressing that very observation(e.g.The Global Fertility Crash).
Looking at Fig. 4 you can see that in the 1950’s the number of births was under 500,000 but the total fertility rate of that time suggests an average of around five children per woman entering childbearing age (12–51 years of age). These numbers were accomplished in a time where world population was under 3 billion(Fig.1). This in comparison to today, where the population nears 8 billion. The number of Births are higher as a result of that increased population, but the total fertility has decreased so that the average woman today will have 1 or 2 children throughout their childbearing years. What does that mean for our future?
At the current rate of descent in the fertility rate, the number of births the world will experience each year will begin to decline as well. Sounding a lot less like the world will be overcrowded and more like we won’t be able to replace the people we lose each year, but that is only a problem if the number of births falls below the number of deaths the world experiences.
Fig. 6 shows that there is no immediate threat of that happening any time soon. However, the same cannot be said of the future. The number of deaths the world experiences has increased annually (which correlates with the rise of population). And if one factors in the threat of a virus yet to be understood or completely contained we may need to consider changes now to prevent that kind of rise in the future.
Takeaway
The world may have jumped ahead of itself in reaching the conclusion that there were too many people. Considering the words of Radhanath Swami, it’s not the population exploding that will be the problem but imploding as we progress past the obligation to have children(as it is much less a requirement today as it was in say the 50’s) and the people of yesteryear shuffle off this mortal coil. Our rate of growth has slowed as fewer people have opted out of having children in lieu of pursing careers or simply waiting later in life to have them.
As the number of deaths continue to rise with the decline of the fertility rate, our population stands to suffer. As Fig. 2 shows, that does not mean the end of the world is coming. It does mean that we should consider that as our population grows we shape the world to suit that growth, and if there aren’t enough people to replace those that are lost the crisis can be one that we never saw coming because, well, there’s just too many people.
